One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [5]
“Yes,” Billy said, slightly relieved. “Don’t you read the papers?”
“Something came up this morning.” Mindy’s eyes narrowed. “Should be interesting to see who tries to buy the apartment.”
“A rich hedge-funder, I would imagine.”
“I hate them, don’t you?” Mindy said. And without saying goodbye, she turned on her heel and walked abruptly away.
Billy shook his head and went home.
Mindy went to the deli around the corner. When she returned, the photographers were still on the sidewalk in front of One Fifth. Mindy was suddenly enraged by their presence.
“Roberto,” Mindy said, getting in the doorman’s face. “I want you to call the police. We need to get rid of those photographers.”
“Okay, Missus Mindy,” Roberto said.
“I mean it, Roberto. Have you noticed that there are more and more of these paparazzi types on the street lately?”
“It’s because of all the celebrities,” Roberto said. “I can’t do anything about them.”
“Someone should do something,” Mindy said. “I’m going to talk to the mayor about it. Next time I see him. If he can drum out smokers and trans fat, he can certainly do something about these hoodlum photographers.”
“He’ll be sure to listen to you,” Roberto said.
“You know, James and I do know him,” Mindy said. “The mayor. We’ve known him for years. From before he was the mayor.”
“I’ll try to shoo them away,” Roberto said. “But it’s a free country.”
“Not anymore,” Mindy said. She walked past the elevator and opened the door to her ground-floor apartment.
The Gooches’ apartment was one of the oddest in the building, consisting of a string of rooms that had once been servants’ quarters and storage rooms. The apartment was an unwieldy shape of boxlike spaces, dead-end rooms, and dark patches, reflecting the inner psychosis of James and Mindy Gooch and shaping the psychology of their little family. Which could be summed up in one word: dysfunctional.
In the summer, the low-ceilinged rooms were hot; in the winter, cold. The biggest room in the warren, the one they used as their living room, had a shallow fireplace. Mindy imagined it as a room once occupied by a majordomo, the head of all servants. Perhaps he had lured young female maids into his room and had sex with them. Perhaps he had been gay. And now, eighty years later, here she and James lived in those same quarters. It felt historically wrong. After years and years of pursuing the American dream, of aspirations and university educations and hard, hard work, all you got for your efforts these days were servants’ quarters in Manhattan. And being told you were lucky to have them. While upstairs, one of the grandest apartments in Manhattan was empty, waiting to be filled by some wealthy banker type, probably a young man who cared only about money and nothing about the good of the country or its people, who would live like a little king. In an apartment that morally should have been hers and James’s.
In a tiny room at the edge of the apartment, her husband, James, with his sweet balding head and messy blond comb-over, was pecking away mercilessly at his computer, working on his book, distracted and believing, as always, that he was on the edge of failure. Of all his feelings, this edge-of-failure feeling was the most prominent. It dwarfed all other feelings, crowding them out and pushing them to the edge of his consciousness, where they squatted like old packages in the corner of a room. Perhaps there were good things in those packages, useful things, but James hadn’t the time to unwrap them.
James heard the soft thud of the door in the other part of the apartment as Mindy came in. Or perhaps he only sensed her presence. He’d been around Mindy for so long, he could feel the vibrations she set off in the air. They weren’t particularly soothing vibrations, but they were familiar.
Mindy appeared before him, paused, then sat down in his old leather club chair, purchased at the fire sale in the Plaza